Features

Engaging, cutomisable UI – iNQUIRE is built with the needs of researchers in mind and presents a truly next-generation interface. As it’s built using HTML5 and CSS, you can easily re-skin the application. Additionally all functionality is modular and can be modified, deleted, or the layout changed without an extensive recode.

Customisable views – researchers may use iNQUIRE on a mobile phone, tablet, PC, and with a networked or 3G connection. The iNQUIRE interface can be switched by the user to show images of variable sizes and then show then in grid, thumbnail list or list view to accomodate this. Side panels containing metadata or collections can be minimised to give maximum screen real estate to the digital images. The interface is also fully responsive.

Powerful researcher toolset – the toolset follows the 6 stage approach to research we identified here, but include:

facetted search

search suggestion

collection creation

hit-highlighting

export

email

download

annotation

tagging

social media integration

deep zoom image view

Open standards – iNQUIRE is built using HTML5, Javascript, CSS and ASP.NET, open standards that mean it will run on any platform and customers will be easily able to edit the code should they wish.

Abstracted from repository and catalogue – iNQUIRE is driven by it’s own SOLR index and doesn’t ingest duplicates of your digital files, so you can continue to work how you want, while iNQUIRE acts as a presentation and discovery layer, abstracted from your core content which can continue to be surfaced in other ways if need be.

Schema, media and format agnostic – the iNQUIRE index can ingest any form of metadata, so it doesn’t matter if you support DCMI, MARC21, METS, SPECTRUM or have your own homebrew schema in a MySQL database, we can work with it. Likewise, iNQUIRE can surface JPEG,s TIFFs, JPEG2000, PDFs or Word files – there’s no need to transcode as iNQUIRE does it on-the-fly. It even creates DeepZoom compositions dynamically, giving your users access to archival-resolution image quality files.

Short deployment cycle – because iNQUIRE is a pre-built framework, and it doesn’t require changes to the catalogue or repository, the deployment cycle can be as short as 30 days. Extensive customisation may lengthen this cycle.

Tested and reliable – the principles underpinning iNQUIRE are based on extensive research, the team that built it are award-winning developers, and the framework has been successfully deployed at the Bodleian Library. So, as well as the extensive feature set, you can rest assured that the software is dependable, optimised and supported.